Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [40]
But under such pressure, it was perhaps inevitable that frustrations would be vented volcanically. The fascinating thing is the senior staff seemed to succeed in not taking it out on the younger people working for them. We must remind ourselves that when it came to his own team of girls, Knox was never anything less than generosity and consideration. In August 1940, he was concerned about the amount of money they were getting and wrote in a memo:
Miss Lever [now Mrs Batey] is the most capable and the most useful and if there is any scheme of selection for a small advancement in wages, her name should be considered …
Miss M Rock is entirely in the wrong grade. She is actually 4th or 5th best of the whole Enigma staff and quite as useful as some of the ‘professors’. I recommend that she should be put on to the highest possible salary for anyone of her seniority.6
But the really impressive thing about this, and other leaps forward made with Colossus, the successor to the bombes, was that they were made in such incredibly demanding circumstances.
The months between September 1939 and the spring of 1940 had given Bletchley Park the advantage of a quiet run-up; but once Britain was caught up wholly in the conflict, this luxury was gone. From the need to try and anticipate bombing raids, to the later stalking games being played in the north Atlantic between the convoys and the U-boats, information provided by Bletchley was crucial. And the demands for it were intense. So how did the younger code-breakers deal individually with such a crushing weight of expectations? In the case of one particular Bletchley couple, it was with remarkable coolness.
As Mavis Batey says, ‘At the time, you took it as a matter of fact … we’d be given the message, with the instruction “jumbo rush” which meant absolutely all out, no one do anything else, get it through. It was all about an invasion.
‘But we had no idea where the invasion was going to be until we turned on the radio in the morning and heard that we had landed in North Africa. And we’d think, “Oh, that’s what we were doing, was it?” But we never felt terribly “aren’t we clever” or anything like that.
‘The authorities were very sensible about that,’ adds Mrs Batey. ‘Just imagine that the codework in front of you is a crossword. If you had someone breathing down your neck and saying: “You’ve got to get it done in five minutes,” it wouldn’t help at all.’
‘It wouldn’t have done any good to get worked up about it,’ says her husband Keith. ‘And you got used to doing it. When you have been in a situation before, you get less worked up about it. I dare say if you were just plonked down and told that there was a war going on, you would get bothered about it. But given that you have been at it for several months, years … we got hardened, I suppose.
‘Some people may have got stressed but I don’t know anybody who did. Whether the senior people got worked up, though,’ he adds, ‘they could have done.’
In fact, Dilly Knox was not alone in getting ‘worked up’. Angus Wilson, who joined Hut 8 in the early 1940s, is now one of those Park figures who evokes the fondest and most vivid memories, even in people who did not work directly alongside him. This is probably because Wilson (like Alan Turing) made few attempts to disguise his homosexuality, or to tone down his colourful manner. ‘Angus Wilson was as queer as a coot,’ says Sarah Baring, herself not inclined to tone it down. ‘And he was always losing his temper, you know, like a child.
‘I remember once, he came out of one of the huts. You know the big pond in front of the house? Well he was in a sort of state, a real paddy. Someone said to him, “Do stop it, Angus, otherwise we’ll put you in the lake!” And he said: “Don’t worry, I’ll do it myself!” And he did. He threw himself in, and he had to be pulled out.’
Wilson